


Milk-Daughter

by Mejhiren



Series: Fairy Tales of Panem [6]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Breastfeeding, Extra-Charactericular Smut, F/M, Fairy Tales, Milk Kinship, Snow White - Freeform, Stepmother!Raisa, Stepmothers, Stepsibling Relationship, Stepsiblings, Wet Nurses, blended families - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-02-14 04:03:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2177211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mejhiren/pseuds/Mejhiren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Much later she would see how like a spell that moment had been: a grief-stricken king and a ripe-breasted baker’s widow, the glory of her bright hair spilling about her bare torso. Later still there would be blame laid, and enchantments identified and condemned. But in that humble kitchen, during the coldest May anyone could remember, the only enchantments present were of the natural sort which spring up, unbidden, in the human mind and heart.</i>
</p><p>A hungry infant brings together a baker's widow and a grieving king. A prologue of sorts to an Everlark Snow White, following the stepmother's story and her relationship with her stepdaughter; this begins as Jack/Raisa (Mr. Everdeen/Mrs. Mellark) but will eventually end up with Peeta/Katniss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Baker's Widow

He had stayed too long at the abbey.

Since the queen’s death he had done little else but ride betwixt the palace and that place and linger in the woods as he passed through, half-heartedly bringing down rabbits and game-birds with bowshots made clumsy by grief. The meat he gave to the abbot or, indeed, any person who would accept a free meal from royal hands.

Seven days had come and gone since the queen breathed her last, and in that time, nothing but bread and water had passed the king’s lips.

He was some ways from the palace still – indeed, on the very fringe of the village below – when the fur-bundled infant gave a squall from her nest inside the breast of his jerkin. He had stayed too long at the abbey, and here was clear proof of it.

The queen had drawn her last breath in the same moment that the princess had taken her first, and thus there had been no tender embrace of mother and newborn child; no careful guiding of a tiny head to a full breast, no fierce latching-on, nor eager suckling. The king, practical even in that first, bitterest hour of grief, sent at once for a plump skin of goat’s milk, still warm from the udder, and wet his fingertips with it, then brought them to his daughter’s wildly rooting mouth. The princess suckled at his fingers with a desperate vigor as he coated them again and again with fresh milk, and now and again she would even drink directly from the neck of the skin.

This arrangement had served them remarkably well for the past sevennight. The king was never far from goat’s milk, for there were many ivory-coated nannies in the palace dairy, and the abbot kept milk-goats himself, and geese besides. But this day the king had stayed too long at the abbey, and the princess had drunk up all the milk the abbot had given them. The palace lay a quarter-hour’s ride ahead still, and the milk-goats a little ways further, and the king knew his daughter too well to think he could quiet her raging belly so long as that. He tried easing the tip of his thumb between her lips to placate her, but she spat it out with a grunt of displeasure and an angry lash of her wet little tongue.

To add insult to injury, it had been raining since they left the abbey, and though the princess was secure and quite dry in her hideaway of sorts, the king’s dark hair was plastered to his skull, and his riding leathers were damp and cold. The streets were rapidly emptying of makeshift stalls and carts and persons, and the grief-hollowed king was less than eager to begin knocking on doors and inquiring if there was a milk-goat about.

The hungry princess gave a second cry then – a piercing, emphatic one, as though she suspected her father had not heard her first demand for food or perhaps meant to ignore it – but this time, strangely, another cry answered it. Another infant, very near.

The king looked about them at the muddy streets, the travelers hurrying toward shelter with their cloaks pulled tight, the merchants bustling away the last of their wares before the rain destroyed them, and the cry came again. This time the direction was clear, and the king’s keen eyes were drawn to an aproned woman in a dress of blue homespun. Her sleeves were cuffed above her elbows, baring strong arms as pale as milk, and a thick hank of red-gold hair had slipped from her white cap to lie, damp and curling, along her slim neck.

A baker’s wife, and no mistake.

She stood in the doorway to her shop, clutching two sodden loaves with one arm and scowling at the empty rain-logged street. Across her chest was strapped a sling of coarse cloth, and in that sling lay an infant. He was clearly there to feed while his mother worked, for her dress was unlaced a little and tugged to one side, and the king glimpsed a peak of dusty pink against the baby’s cheek.

 _Surely,_ thought the king with a silent prayer of both thanks and supplication at such a sight, _here is milk for my daughter._

“Goodwife,” he called to the woman, drawing her eyes at once – common blue, they were, but flecked _un_ commonly with hazel. “The princess is hungry,” he said – a needless explanation, in light of the mewling cries now being exchanged betwixt his jerkin and her sling. “If you have milk sufficient for two, I will pay you well to feed her.”

The woman sketched a careful curtsey, elegant for a merchant’s wife. “Of course, your majesty,” she replied. “Come inside and warm yourself by the ovens, and I shall gladly see to your babe.”

* * *

A king stood in the bakery doorway, dark and lean and magnificently handsome, even wet-through with rain as he was, and tucked inside the damp jerkin of his riding leathers was the princess herself, wrapped in fur and shrieking for a meal.

Raisa had never longed for anything so badly as to suckle a baby girl, and to nurse a _princess_ would be very heaven.

She nodded to her brother-in-law, a red-faced man with a sweaty mop of straw-colored hair who worked a great mass of dough with her two elder sons – one five years old and nearly capable, the other just past his first year and toddling squarely – each clinging to one strong leg, then she led the king back to the kitchen, where the ovens still blazed with welcome heat on such an unseasonably cold spring day.

“Take your ease, majesty,” she urged, retrieving a stool for him, then she assembled a plate of bread, butter, and cheese and a cup of cold cider for his repast, which he took with quiet thanks but made no move to consume. She unbound the sling from her chest and laid her fussing boy upon a sack of flour while she made short work of the remainder of her laces, then she turned down her bodice about her waist, leaving her bare-breasted in the presence of a king.

She did this not out of lack of modesty nor intention to seduce, but raising three babes – and all of them boys with lusty appetites – whittles away at a goodwife’s sensibilities. One learns to nurse one’s children when and where she can, never mind the presence of others, be they burgher, bishop, or king. What was more, Raisa knew she would have two to feed this time – for her son would not wait for his meal, nor did the king seem to expect it – and it would be nigh unto impossible to retain any shred of modesty, or clothing above the waist, if she wished to suckle two babes at once.

She went to the king then, who had watched her all this while, as though enraptured, and eased the princess from inside his jerkin. She was a tiny thing, no bigger than a kitten in her sleek bunting of rabbit fur, with wisps of dusty black hair and a scrunched-up red face. She smelled of apple blossoms and wet woods and holy places, of goat’s milk and violets and the musk of her father’s body.

Raisa fell in love with her at once.

It took a little to get the squalling princess to accept a breast, to latch her yowling little mouth around the nipple and suckle properly, and Raisa wondered if this could be the first time the baby had been fed in such a fashion. To be sure, there had been no rumor of a wet-nurse in the scant week since the queen had died. But once the princess drew her first mouthful of mother’s milk, her tiny jaw snugged tight as a snapping turtle’s and she sucked and sucked with all her might. _This,_ her happy swallows and rhythmic little grunts seemed to say. _Not goat’s milk, not even from my papa’s fingers._

Raisa moaned a little and bent to kiss the princess’s dark head as she cradled her even closer. The babe’s angry brow was smooth now; blissful, even, and already Raisa ached that this moment would not last much longer. The princess was suckling steadily, and as a mother of three babes, Raisa knew that a breast could be drained entirely in a quarter-hour, perhaps less. In a matter of minutes, the king would leave behind his bread and cheese and take this tiny precious thing away forever.

With a sigh that was dangerously near a sob, Raisa picked up her son – himself little bigger than the princess, for he was a matter of weeks older – and shifted him with ease to latch onto her other breast. She had fed two at once now and again – this one and the next, a year older – and was not unaccustomed to the pleasure wrought by suckling mouths at both breasts, but how much more exquisite that one should be a girl, and the very _princess_ at that.

The princess who, it seemed, had known no breast but Raisa’s.

She seated herself on the flour sack that had briefly cushioned her little son and studied the princess’s face. The baby’s eyes were open now, a wet, deep blue that, no doubt, would soon fade to the silvered smoke of the king’s eyes. Raisa had never seen a wolf before, but she fancied that this hunter-king had a wolf’s eyes – leastways, when they were unshadowed by grief. There was something breathtaking – almost otherworldly – in his lean catlike figure and wide cheekbones; his smooth dusky skin and sleek pitch-black hair.

The princess, Raisa imagined, would favor her father in coloring, but her features were more like the queen’s. A mouth like a wild rose-bud. A nubbin-nose that cried out to be kissed. A brow high and fine, when not clouded with anger, that would bear a crown proudly.

The queen had been lovely in a celestial sort of fashion that most common people – and more than a few nobly-born – equated with the Blessed Virgin: hair as fine and pale as spidersilk shot through with gold, clear porcelain skin, slender hands and wide violet eyes. But Raisa knew better than most that the late queen had not been the saintliest of maids.

She remembered well when the king’s wife had been simply Alyssum, an apothecary’s daughter with wildflowers woven into her thick wheat-blonde plaits and love-bites marring the white skin of her long neck. She had been all but promised to the baker’s eldest son then – a brawny, handsome boy, all broad shoulders and golden curls – and she took him often into the woods when her parents sent her foraging for rare herbs. Afterward there would be bits of moss in her hair and bark stains down the back of her skirts, no matter how vigilantly the lovers strove to conceal their trysting, and it was no great secret that the apothecary’s daughter splayed her white legs for her sweetheart anytime they reached the safety of woodland shadows.

But of course, one day she had reached the woods ahead of her boy and had instead found the king himself, hunting in his leathers and singing like a six-winged seraph. How they won each other in a single morn, none ever quite knew, though when the heartbroken baker’s boy pressed his love for an answer, she spoke most ardently of the king’s voice, so beautiful that the very birds in the woods fell silent to hear his songs.

Raisa knew this much better than most, for the night that Alyssum became queen, Raisa lay beneath the baker’s boy and bit back cries of pain as he rent her maidenhead with deep, angry thrusts. Afterward he sobbed for shame and turned away from her, but she tucked herself against his broad back and pressed teary kisses to his damp skin. _Stay with me,_ she soothed, caressing his chest with one shaky hand. _I would marry you tomorrow if you asked. I would make you a fine wife. I love you._

None of this was untrue, and broken as he was by sorrow and shame, the baker’s son agreed. They joined hands before the village priest the next day, and Raisa left her mother’s house for her husband’s. Janek was a good man and a good spouse; he kept Raisa warm and clothed and well-fed and gave her three fine sons besides – but he never stopped loving the queen. Not when his sons grew in his wife’s belly. Not even when the king at last put a child in the queen’s.

The king spoke then, his voice – every bit as musical as Raisa had been led to believe – luring her out of her reverie. “Your husband mislikes that you show yourself thus to a king, goodwife?” he said, his brows half-raised in question.

It took a good long moment to make sense of these words. “My husband is in Heaven, majesty,” she said. “The man you saw at the kneading is his brother, who knows well that we cannot refuse any opportunity to earn gold, even if I must suckle another’s child for it.”

Her spouse, like the king’s, had died a sevennight ago. At the very moment of the queen’s death, Janek’s heart had burst, and Raisa found him lying like a stone beside an oven full of burnt bread. She had just sent her eldest son to fetch the priest when the cathedral bells sounded the queen’s passing.

Of course, she told the king none of this, thinking to spare him further grief, though she wondered a little whether he had ever given a moment’s thought to what became of his wife’s former lover. Whether he would be surprised to learn that he sat beneath that man’s roof and warmed himself at his ovens while that man’s widow suckled his child.

“Good widow, how are you called?” the king asked. There was a faint light in his shadowed eyes now, as though he had found something interesting in her words.

“Raisa, your majesty,” she replied, and stood a little to sketch another curtsey.

“Raisa,” he echoed – or mused, perhaps – and raised the cup of cider to his lips. His damp leathers steamed at the heat of the ovens, giving off odors of horseflesh and incense and a musk so rampantly _male_ that Raisa pressed her thighs together beneath her skirts and blushed hotly. It was too much: twin infant mouths suckling her breasts in tandem as she sat opposite this breathtakingly _wild_ king and spoke in intimate whispers.

His jaw was dark with a week’s growth of black whiskers, and Raisa recalled hearing once that the queen herself shaved him each morning with her fine white hands. She wondered, with the queen gone, whether the king would ever shave again, and considered that a beard became his face magnificently.

He ate a bite of cheese carefully, as though his mouth had forgotten what food was, and Raisa blushed hotter still. She turned her attention back to the princess tucked against her; a safer subject for her consideration, and one more beloved. She kissed the little brow again and again and nuzzled it a little with her cheek. An unforgivable impropriety, surely, to press common lips to a royal face, but there was only the king to bear witness, and he had given no sign of offense. Not to mention, when royal lips suckled at a common breast and a goodwife’s milk filled a royal belly, any lesser intimacy could hardly be remarked upon.

Raisa bent again, this time to brush the tiny nubbin-nose with her own, and felt a tear slip from her cheek to wet the princess’s brow. There would be no daughter for her to bear and love and suckle, even if she took another husband. Something had gone wrong with her last birthing; bleeding, tearing, pain beyond comprehension. Her third son – the plump, florid-cheeked boy who suckled at her other breast and brushed his feet against the princess’s silky rabbit-bunting – had been delivered safely, but the midwife told Raisa that she had been lucky to survive the birthing and would never conceive again.

It would have been bearable if Peeta had been a girl, but to birth a third stocky baker-boy and in the process, lose any chance of ever conceiving a girl... Raisa had wept for days, and only her husband’s constant pleas had persuaded her to take their newborn son to her breast. She loved him, of course, as any mother would, but she could not forget what he might have been and what now would _never_ be, and never more so than at this moment, when a princess suckled and dozed and cooed at her other breast.

Two babes could not have been more different. On Raisa’s right lay her round, rosy son, heavy as a sack of bricks and grunting his displeasure as he suckled without success (for he had drained his breast quickly and wanted even _more_ , though Raisa would sooner die than stint the princess on her first proper meal), and on her left was this feather of a princess with a face like a dusky angel, her tiny pursed mouth as lovely as a wild rose-bud.

That sweet mouth was easing its latch upon Raisa’s breast and would soon break it altogether, and Raisa shed another tear in anticipation of that loss. Had she a hand free, she would have caressed the princess’s downy head till her gently questing fingertips found the soft spot at the back of the skull, then circled it again and again with tender affection. But her arms were both weighted down and full with babes, so instead she moaned with maternal longing and sorrow at the thought of giving this precious thing back to her father, so very soon now. She wondered through her tears who would feed the princess tomorrow, or even tonight, for now that she’d had a taste of breast milk – indeed, a bellyful of it – she would not happily take goat’s milk from her father’s fingers.

The princess’s mouth loosed its latch with a contented gurgle and Raisa bit back a piercing cry, as though a blade had been driven deep into her heart. Was God in His heaven so cruel? that a king should do what her husband could not: put a perfect girl-child in her arms for her to suckle and coddle and love, only to take it away again a matter of moments later and leave Raisa to her cross, workworn brother-in-law and her husband’s three stout sons, all of them sturdy as chimneys and greedy as piglets? She knew now why Janek’s heart had burst at the queen’s death, for her own would do likewise when the king and his daughter rode away. There would be another body beside the ovens and another grave for her boys to puzzle and wail over as they scattered clumsy fistfuls of violets upon the freshly turned earth.

She rose from her flour-cushion as one going to her death and laid her son down upon it once more, bundling him in the sling-cloth so he would not roll off his makeshift bed as he fussed for more milk. Then she cupped the princess in both hands – she was so tiny, it required little else to contain her – and lifted her so their foreheads might touch _._ “Be strong and brave, my owlet,” Raisa whispered through a fresh wave of hot tears. “One day you will rule us all, and be praised as the fairest in all the land.”

With these words she pressed a dozen kisses to every inch of the princess that she could reach: her wet blue eyes and high dusky brow; her tufts of fine black hair, so like a nestling’s first feathers, and the tender fontanelles just beneath; her perfect ears and her nubbin-nose – _oh, that nose!_ – and her rose-bud mouth, now slippery and sweet with breast milk. The rest of her was snugly encased in rabbit skin, but Raisa kissed those bits anyway and imagined how they might be, were this baby truly hers, to be fed and bathed and cuddled. The elusive indent of her neck. The flat of her narrow chest, beneath which beat the heart of a future queen. Her hands, which of a certainty would be long-fingered and deft as her father’s in good time. Her little belly, pleasantly swollen with milk. Even her feet were showered with kisses where they batted weakly against the fur, and Raisa wept for just one glimpse of perfect dusky toes.

She cradled the princess against her chest for a few final moments and made to wipe her tears on her sleeve, but she had forgotten that she was naked from the waist upwards, and her wet face met bare skin instead of homespun. She stood needlessly bare-breasted in the presence of her king. It was time and past to return his child and cover herself properly.

She crossed, wet-eyed and hot-cheeked, to give the princess back to her father, and the king’s hands were free to take his child, for he had cleaned his plate and drained his cup of cider, and the dishes stood empty beside his stool. _I have fed both the widower-king and his daughter,_ Raisa thought with a broken attempt at a smile as she laid her precious charge in the king’s hands.

The king took the princess wordlessly and tucked her inside his jerkin once more with a soft kiss to her brow, but he made no move to rise, and his eyes lingered strangely on Raisa’s face. There was grief in those quicksilver eyes; _such_ grief, and perhaps longing for what this moment should have been: his fairylike queen on a bed of silks, her pale hair like a halo about her radiant face as she drew aside her fine robe to suckle their child.

And because of this – for his grief and longing, and her own love for his daughter – Raisa took the king’s face in her hands with a little sigh and bent to press a kiss to his brow.

This, she knew better than her own name, was unforgivable –that a baker’s widow should kiss a king – and yet she could not help herself, for her heart overflowed with his grief and her own. And then his brow was not enough and her lips crept downward to press kisses to his shadowed eyes, his straight nose, the proud contours of his cheekbones, and at last his mouth in its ragged nest of black beard. His lips were unresponsive beneath hers – indeed, he seemed scarcely to have breathed since first she kissed his brow – but she tasted cider and cheese through the salt of her tears and kissed his bearded mouth again and again and again.

She did this not out of passion but _compassion_ , for his yawning lifetime of nights in a cold bed where before there had been the heady warmth and lush roundness of the queen’s pregnant form. For his stride through the palace’s stone halls, which no longer had an echo of small, slippered feet. For a pillow without its cover of unbound flaxen hair or the indent of the queen’s head.

All at once the reality of what she did descended like an icy downpour, and Raisa drew back with a cry of horror. Had she no decency? Here she stood, bare-breasted as trollop, kissing a newly widowed king on her kitchen stool!

She made to step back then, and would have done, but the king raised a long-fingered hand to gently stay her arm. “Raisa,” he said again, like a prayer this time. He drew her back to him, a curious half-frown on his lips, and brought his free hand to her temple to tug back her white cap.

A beleaguered mother of three vigorous boys, Raisa had forsaken hairpins and pretty combs long ago. The king’s hand freed the heavy mass of her ruddy blonde hair to tumble down about her shoulders, and she sucked in a shallow breath at the brush of hair on bare skin, as though she were _more_ exposed now, not less so.

“Beautiful,” murmured the king, almost in awe, as he took a long lock between his fingers.

Much later she would see how like a spell that moment had been: a grief-stricken king and a ripe-breasted baker’s widow, the glory of her bright hair spilling about her bare torso. Later still there would be blame laid, and enchantments identified and condemned. But in that humble kitchen, during the coldest May anyone could remember, the only enchantments present were of the natural sort which spring up, unbidden, in the human mind and heart. 

“Raisa,” the king said softly, “how would you like to be a queen?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been sitting on this fic since last fall, when I posted this first "chapter" to my Tumblr. I had every intention of returning to it, and a whole new batch of Everlark fairy tales, this spring/summer, but a glut of real-life factors, including a car accident, financial struggles, and most recently major surgery got in the way. :(
> 
> Said surgery ended up being a hysterectomy, from which I'm currently recovering both physically and emotionally and which should make this the very last fic I'd want to come anywhere near. But several Tumblr friends have remarked lately on how comforting my fics have been to readers in all sorts of situations all over the world, and I woke up this morning wondering if maybe, just maybe, this particular story might bring some solace to readers who are going through (or have gone through) the same sort of grief as me.
> 
> Fair warning: Raisa *is* the stepmother in this Snow White reboot and things will not, of course, remain entirely rosy for her throughout the fic (whenever I manage to continue it), but I love this incarnation of her far too much to send her off into the sunset in a pair of red-hot shoes/similar. And to be entirely honest, I ship her and Jack (Mr. Everdeen) so hard it just might be illegal, so there's that as well. ;D


	2. The New Queen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A portion of this chapter was previously posted to Tumblr.

There was little romance in what came next, but Raisa cared little enough for such things and neither asked nor sought for them. Her madly drumming heart echoed three thoughts only:

She would leave this place.  
She would wed this man.  
She would be mother to his daughter.

The dusky little princess would be her very own, to catch up and love and bathe and cuddle till her heart burst with joy.

The king slipped a silver ring from his right hand and pressed the warm metal into Raisa’s palm. “Take this as a pledge of my promise,” he said. “I shall send a company of lady’s maids before nightfall to bear you to the palace, where we shall be wed in three days’ time.”

“I have three sons,” she told him plainly.

“I will make princes of them,” he replied without hesitation. “They will have velvets and ponies and a nursery to play in, filled with every toy they might imagine. They will want for nothing.”

She turned the heavy silver band between her fingers before she said what she must, certain this must change his mind but unable to conceal such a weighty truth from a man she had already begun to love. “I can give you no more children,” she whispered. “Something…went wrong when I birthed my last, and I cannot conceive again.”

“I want no other children,” he answered, his lovely voice so sharp and fierce that for a moment it frightened her – but then she realized, _Of course._ He had the princess; the queen’s daughter, to be queen in her turn. Even if Raisa could give him a son, that child would never take the throne, let alone hold half the love the queen’s daughter commanded without effort.

“Nor I,” she told him honestly, for once the princess was made Raisa’s own daughter by marriage, her every desire would be happily laid to rest.

He kissed her cheek before they parted and lifted out the dozing princess from his jerkin before Raisa could ask, so she might kiss the tiny face one more time. “Can you love her as your own?” he whispered.

“I already do,” she whispered in reply.

So dazed was she by all that had taken place in the span of one half-hour that she nearly went bare-breasted into the street to wave goodbye to her betrothed and his daughter.

* * *

Breathless with elation as she was at the king’s proposal, Raisa was at heart a poor and practical woman who knew better than to glory in good fortune before it came to fruition. To her scowling brother-in-law she said only that the king had been briefly in need of a wet-nurse to suckle the princess and had paid her for the service with a silver ring. To her five-year-old son she said that they might have a grand visitor soon, then she rolled up her sleeves and plunked him into the washtub without preamble, along with his toddling brother, to be scrubbed till their skins were pink and squeaking and their pale curls dark and dripping down their broad brows. The youngest she washed on his own, and more gently, for stocky as he was, his small body was tender, and he would soon be milk-brother to a princess. _A twin, nearly,_ thought Raisa, who had such a brother herself, for the king’s daughter and her youngest son would of necessity share her lap, her arms, and her breasts.

 _Every now and again they might even share a cradle,_ she thought with an irrepressible grin of delight as she dusted the baby’s nether regions with a precious pinch of powdered lavender and slipped a square of fresh linen between his chubby legs with a much-practiced ease. Her husband’s golden son – his hair was a dull nut-brown now, but she knew it would fall out soon enough and sprout back in as Janek’s ash-blond curls – and the king’s dark daughter. Light and shadow they would be; one on her right and the other on her left – and she a queen, garbed in silks and lace.

She bathed herself last of all and lingered, bare-breasted, before her paltry looking-glass by candlelight, pondering what it was that had caught the king’s attention and turned it to thoughts of marriage. Her thick mane of hair was pleasant enough, but he had seen that last of all, and of course her lashes were long – _impossibly so,_ Janek had breathed one night as he lay over her and traced her eyes with wondering fingertips – but so light, like threads of fire-kissed honey, that people tended to overlook them.

Her gaze fell to her breasts then and she lifted one in either hand, contemplating them in the glass. Before her marriage they had been modest in size, neither remarkable nor invisible beneath her bodices, but suckling three boys had made them plump and heavy as ripe fruits. Indeed, by candlelight they were like round golden apples; creamy-fleshed, with peaks of dark rose-pink and so full with milk that her back bent like a branch beneath their weight. _But surely,_ she thought wryly, _a grieving king would not hand over his beloved wife’s throne simply because of a handsome pair of breasts?_

Peeta gave a hungry cry then, greedy boy that he was, and she picked him up and brought him to a breast without thought. She did not intend to look into the glass again, but she caught a glimpse of herself suckling her son and stepped closer in fascination. Alyssum she was not, for her face was too ordinary, her cheeks too flushed, her hair too vibrant. But by candlelight, with her hair loose and luminous about her face and her eyes soft as Peeta nursed contentedly at her breast, there was something of the Madonna about Raisa.

But in a woman who wished to wed a king so that she might be mother to his daughter, she supposed, such beatific maternal beauty was no bad thing.

* * *

The lady’s maids arrived well before nightfall, and an efficient company they were: four soft-spoken women in crisp dark skirts, as slender and dusky as the king. The foremost among them pressed pouches of gold into the hands of Raisa’s stunned brother-in-law – for the loss of his workers, she explained, and promised more to come on the morrow, when the king himself would pay a call.

“Take only what you must, milady,” the same woman urged Raisa as the others wrapped her sons in woolen blankets against the damp chill of the evening. “He means to give you everything.”

She took a parcel of clean linens for her two youngest sons, her little pot of healing salve, and a pouch of clothes-peg soldiers that her husband had painted for their eldest to play with and which she knew the boy would not depart without, no matter how many fine, bejeweled toys a royal nursery offered. Even her wedding ring – a crude silver band, hard-earned and purchased for another’s hand – she left behind, that it might buy her husband’s brother a little comfort or perhaps pay the wages of the workers he must now hire and train.

Raisa and her sons were borne to the palace in a gaily painted wagon drawn by tuft-footed ponies, and her eldest son’s gasps and cries of wonder were exceeded only by her own. Stone walls and halls unfolded before them; jewel-bright stained glass, illumined from within by a thousand candles, and everywhere the scents of feasting and fine, courtly perfumes.

They were delivered to a grand suite of rooms – temporarily, the lady’s maid said, only till the wedding, when the boys would be given the run of the royal nursery and Raisa the queen’s own chambers – and Raisa sank to her knees on a rug as finely woven as any tapestry and sobbed at the grandeur of the roaring fireplace, wider than the bed she had shared with her husband and sons at the bakery. Supper was brought to them at once: half a pheasant, gilded with honey-sauce and some tart crimson berries, as well as bread and cakes and gently warmed mead-wine.

Raisa and her little sons ate till they cried, till they thought they should burst, then there was a knock at the door and the king himself came in, dressed now in a tunic the color of ripe plums and dun hose that revealed every supple contour of his long, lean legs. In his arms, of course, was the princess, wound in a trailing sheath of shimmering silver lawn sprinkled about with embroidered wood violets and endeavoring to lift her dark head, her wet eyes bright and eager at the sight of the woman who had suckled her just hours before.

Raisa wept even harder then.

Introductions were attempted, then the king sat on the tapestry-rug to play at clothes-peg soldiers with the boys while Raisa settled into a velvet-cushioned chair and cradled the hungry princess to her breast. She sang a little this time – brokenly, for her tears would not cease – as she basked in the treasures that were the princess’s tiny dusky hands, pressing Raisa’s pale breast like a suckling kitten’s paws as she drank her fill. When those precious hands were no longer sufficient, Raisa tugged up the pretty lawn-sheath to find the princess’s feet and caress every dimple and crease and round little toe in its turn, and laughed and cried in equal measure.

The king asked, with some uncertainty, whether it might be all right to move the princess’s cradle into Raisa’s rooms until the wedding, and she responded in joy unbounded that she would be happy to share a room with the princess to the end of their days. “It pains me to part from her, even for a night,” the king confessed, “but you can give her what I cannot, and I believe you love her nearly as much as I.”

 _Or perhaps even more,_ cried Raisa’s swelling heart, but it does not do to contradict a king, let alone in a matter such as this.

The king kissed her boys atop their curly heads, then Raisa herself – tenderly, a brush of whiskers against her cheek – and finally the sleepy princess, her wild rose-bud mouth shaping wet, milky bubbles as she gurgled and yawned and cooed from the pleasant alcove of Raisa’s arms. Then he took his leave with silver eyes that were no longer quite so shadowed, and the lady’s maids returned to prepare Raisa and her boys for bed.

The nightgown they gave her was soft as goose down against her skin, and the broad feather-bed into which they tucked her had a coverlet of wine-red silk, beneath which anyone should drift to sleep with nary a second thought, but Raisa lay only ten heartbeats after the last maid had departed before slipping out of bed and going to the chamber’s two cradles to retrieve first her youngest son, then the princess. Janek had never objected to sleeping with a baby between them, nor to the drowsy languor of midnight feedings, and Raisa ached above all things to sleep with the princess in her arms.

She made a bolster of pillows to keep the babes from rolling off the bed in their sleepy flails, impossibly wide though the mattress was, then eased the nightgown off her shoulders and knotted its sleeves about her waist. It had been easiest this way, sleeping with her breasts bared when the boys were likely to wake with hunger, and her late husband had never objected to that either.

She slept on her side with a careful hand on each babe, and the princess the closer of the two, so Raisa might kiss and nuzzle and whisper of love all through the night. So she might drink in every fist curl and restless wriggle, every quick milk-sweetened breath and sleepy kick of a tiny foot, while breathing in the scents of violets and fur and the musk of the king’s own body that clung to his perfect baby daughter.

Raisa had never enjoyed a more wondrous night, not even the most pleasurable one Janek had given her with his roving mouth and hands.

She had just dozed off when a rooting rose-bud mouth lipped wetly at the curve of one breast, and she guided the hungry princess to her nipple as tears of bliss streamed down her face.

* * *

The days that followed rendered the palace a hive of glorious activity in preparation for the new queen and her princes.

The chief lady’s maid raised a black brow to find Raisa abed with her nightgown down about her waist and both babes asleep at a breast when last night they had been snugly secured in their own cradles, but she did not chide, and no more did the king when he joined them at breakfast a short while later. “You care for my catkin like no other,” he said, bending to kiss his daughter’s downy dark head as she fussed in the crook of his arm. “I daresay you love her like no other.”

His eyes lingered on Raisa’s as he said this, and something fluttered deep in her belly at the strange heat in their silver shadows. “I daresay I do,” she replied, caressing the princess’s arm, and caught her breath as her fingers brushed the king’s sleeve in the process.

They had thus far exchanged no lover’s touches, not even when her lips had been on his and she stood before him, bare-breasted in the bakery kitchen, and she wondered now whether they ever would. She wondered whether he might be marrying her for his daughter’s sake alone, and whether any fair-haired woman with milk in her breasts might have been queen, had the king paused outside her shop and not Raisa’s.

Such a thought vexed her deeply, and she wondered why it should.

But there was little time to ponder her betrothed’s feelings, if indeed his blinding love for the princess left any to spare, for there were countless gowns to be fitted for and ceremonies to rehearse, with parts for Raisa and even her little sons, now garbed in velvet tunics and soft hose and golden-braided caps, to play. There were courtier’s names to learn and dance steps to practice, and in-between she had the princess and Peeta to feed. There was always a lady’s maid or two present to bear along the babies as the queen-to-be was swept from one end of the palace to the other in a wave of silks and perfume and curtseys, but whenever possible, she carried the princess herself.

Before bed, the lady’s maids bathed Raisa in warm milk, honey, and rosewater and gently polished the oven scars from her skin with sugar and sweet almond oil. The babies burrowed even more snugly against her curves after that, and she laughed through her tears that her body should smell like a confectioner’s shop and draw in babes who were years too young for sweets.

On the morn of the wedding the lady’s maids brushed her hair till it shone like a new-minted copper penny, then netted it back with pearls. Her bridal gown was of amber brocade, with deep sleeves edged in ermine and an underskirt of cloth-of-gold, and her breath caught in her throat as she beheld herself in her new looking-glass, richly framed in wrought gold and standing half a head taller than she. The baker’s weary widow now shimmered like a jewel in a golden setting, as radiant as the sunset on the night she birthed her youngest son.

She would never forget that sunset, for in her agony she had thought the sky was Heaven itself, opening to welcome her.

There were a half a dozen ceremonies to complete: one to put a crown on her head, another a ring on her finger, still another where the king formally kissed each of her sons and set little bronze circlets on their curly heads. Raisa’s senses swam with incense and chrism and the perfumed sweat of courtiers, pressing ever closer to see this golden widow who had mended and stolen the king’s heart all at once, and she was grateful to tears for the periodic cool touch of the lady’s maid’s hand at her wrist, informing her without words that the princess or the youngest new-made prince was crying for milk. Again and again a private chamber was found and the doorway barred by crisp dark skirts, and Raisa gratefully freed a breast – or both, when necessary – over the low square neckline of her bodice and sighed with stolen bliss as she suckled royalty in blessed silence.

The evening culminated in a banquet and a grand ball, and though the accompanying music was of a more sedate nature, owing to the recent losses on the part of the king and his new wife, it was hardly a mourner’s feast. The king wore silver, not black, throughout the ceremonies, and if his manner was more of courtly politeness than radiant joy, Raisa found nothing to fault in it. Theirs was, in its way, a practical marriage, not unlike her first – and once again, she consoled a man whose heart had been broken by the loss of the queen. She knew that role all too well and would play it gladly if the king required it, but at present his eyes were unshadowed and he ate and drank beside her, if not with giddy abandon, neither too with the reluctance of grief, which turns the stomach against food of any kind.

They shared seven dances, each of which meant something or other, but Raisa’s mind was too full of ceremony, of blessings and prayers and vows, to recall which was which. The princess was with them for most of these, of course, cradled in the crook of her father’s strong arm or slumbering against Raisa’s shoulder, and now and again Raisa’s little sons joined them as well, as the steps permitted.

The guests had already begun to depart when the new queen at last stole a moment to greet her family. Her brother and sister she had invited to the festivities with joy but their mother, hobbling behind in the gray crepe of a decades-long widowhood and resembling nothing so much as a dead tree, was another matter. Long had it been whispered that she possessed fairy blood of a twisted sort, for she had a proclivity for muttering unlikely, dire portents – the sudden death of a prized cow, the loss of a fine home to fire, a deadly storm that would strike with no natural warning – that inevitably, invariably came true, and sooner rather than later.

She had told Raisa as a child that she would never win a man of her own but would always be given another’s leavings – a prophecy now proven for the second time; a second bridegroom who had loved and lost the same apothecary’s daughter – and Raisa wished for no such darkness and doom as her mother was wont to speak to overshadow this glorious day.

Raisa’s stout, lusty sister hugged her soundly and gave the new queen a dozen damp kisses and their brother – Raisa’s twin, with the same ruddy blond hair and fair skin, though his eyes had always been colder somehow than her identical hazel-flecked blue – took her face in his long white fingers and kissed her brow. With Raisa’s marriage he and their sister, who had to this day shared a common butcher’s shop in the village, had been elevated to a high place in the palace kitchens and granted the honor of butchering the king’s own game. A dubious distinction for the kin of a queen, perhaps, but they were descended from a line of butchers; swift and clever with their knives. Neither was less than delighted by the offer nor gave any sign that they desired a finer position, and indeed Raisa’s sister – a widow thrice over and the mother of four already – appeared to be utilizing her new station straightaway in the pursuit of another mate to warm her bed, for her merry eyes lingered again and again on the darkly handsome footman who appeared at her elbow every few minutes with a platter of sweet rolls or a pitcher of wine. It was likely indeed that a fifth child lay in her future, and a black-haired one at that, whether or not any exchange of vows and rings came before.

Raisa turned at last to her mother, who had been allotted a pretty little cottage on the fringe of the village and two housemaids to tend it, so that she might be cared for and kept carefully away from her family all at once. The king had asked straightaway if his bride-to-be would like her mother housed at the palace and had not once questioned her refusal, nor the vehemence in it. His previous queen, it was murmured, had broken very badly with her own parents when she became his wife; however it had come about, both the apothecary and his wife were now dead, and their shop boarded up and hung about with cobwebs.

“You have found another heartsick groom, I see,” said Raisa’s mother to the new queen, her withered voice much amused, if not quite cruel. “This is a role you know well, and I doubt not you will play it to perfection.”

Raisa hid her wince behind a careful smile, for she was queen now, and could and must be gracious in the face of delicate taunts and veiled insults. “The king chose me to nourish his daughter and comfort him in his grief,” she replied – a guess, for the king had yet to explain his proposal in any part, though the relegation of the princess almost entirely to her care was a fine clue. “I expect little more from this marriage than meals and a warm bed,” she lied over the hopeful clamor of a new bride’s heart, “albeit a little finer than those Janek gave me.”

“And pray you do not forget it,” her mother cautioned dryly. “Lovely as you shine, daughter, you are a wet-nurse dressed in ermine and cloth-of-gold, nothing more. When your breasts run dry, so too will the king’s hunger for you. When the princess needs you no longer, neither will her father.”

Stung, Raisa swung up a hand – to deflect the verbal blow or strike back, she could not have said – only to have it gently intercepted and lowered to her side by the chief lady’s maid, who had arrived like a shadow with several of her crisp-skirted company. “This one does not merit the wrath-blow of a queen, your majesty,” the woman told her softly. “Least of all on your wedding day, when your hands should be occupied solely with dancing and feasting and pleasure.”

She turned then to Raisa’s mother with the mien of a soldier, her gray eyes sharp with command. “You may leave in the company of my fellows, Dame Elske, with a parcel of the feast for tomorrow’s table,” she said coldly. “Or you may leave at the hands of the guardsmen, who will not deliver you to your fine new cottage, and it will be a long time indeed before you see another meal.

“You will not insult the queen in her own palace,” the lady’s maid declared with a calm more frightening than any bellow of rage. “Let alone on this, her wedding day.”

Raisa’s mother gave the lady’s maid a crooked little nod that was no less deferential, and Raisa wondered for the first time whether this woman might be near-kin to the king himself, with her unique power and presence. Then with a muttered, “ _Remember my words, daughter, and think well on them this night,_ ” Raisa’s mother departed with three of the lady’s maids, one already bearing the promised parcel in a generous hamper.

The chief lady’s maid and two of her company remained behind and led Raisa at once to a quiet chamber. The princess and Peeta were brought to her directly, though not yet hungry for another feeding, and nuzzled their soft precious faces against her breasts like drowsy newborn kittens, and she let tears fall upon their downy heads.

“Your mother, for all her portents, knows precious little about the human heart, majesty,” murmured the chief lady’s maid, daubing Raisa’s burning eyes with a handkerchief damped with rosewater. “I cannot say what lies in Jack’s, but he has known no lover but Alyssum, whom he loved far longer than she knew. He would not give his hand, his name, and his body to a new bride, even in his darkest hour of grief, simply because she could nurse his daughter for a short while.”

Raisa looked up in surprise. She knew the king’s name as well as her own, though she had not spoken it aloud in nearly a decade, so of course this woman – a very intimate of the court – would know it as well. Village children recited it like a prayer at their lessons: _Jack, son of Ashpet the Huntress-Queen –_ the stunning wild maiden who met an angel at the fabled Holy Well, who sewed a gown of ivory doeskins to win the heart of the plain, gentle prince and birthed their only child alone in the woods.

The lady’s maid blushed with surprising delicacy for one so fierce. “Pray forgive my tongue, my queen,” she demurred. “Your lord and I are something of cousins; we were playfellows in childhood and my husband commands his personal guard.”

Raisa waved this aside, for so much had she guessed, or nearly, but she could not quite give voice to what had kindled in her belly at the woman’s previous words. _His body,_ she had said, as though it was natural that the king would lie with Raisa as a lover – not this night, surely, but in due course. Raisa had scarcely dared to think of that before this moment, neither to imagine nor to hope, for she had no maidenhead to grant the king and he wanted no more children, nor could she give him any.

No, if the king chose to lie with her it would be for pleasure alone – or comfort, rather, she supposed. It would not be the first time she lay beneath a husband who did not love her, nor the first time the queen’s name was whimpered in her ear as he drove deep and spilled his seed inside her with a sob. Janek had been a gentle man in truth, and the king seemed likewise, if not more so. She could bear that sort of coupling; could lie beneath the king and let him pour his grief into her and, if he allowed it, offer small gestures of comfort and compassion in her turn, as she had done so long for Janek.

She tried to envision the king moving over her by firelight, spending himself inside her as he wept for his late wife, and fought the urge to weep herself.

The lady’s maids escorted Raisa to her new bedchamber; the queen’s own, refurnished for her, she was told, in ambers and golds and all manner of sunset hues, for reasons she could not begin to guess. They gently bathed her face with rosewater and perfumed her breath with an infusion of orange blossoms and sweet fennel seeds, then they dressed her in a nightgown the color of a ripe peach’s flesh and laid little Peeta and the princess in a tall crib of wrought gold, the construction of which echoed the queen’s broad palatial bed.

“Can I not keep them beside me?” she wondered with a little cry, suddenly suffocated by the distance yawning between them, and the chief lady’s maid gave a careful shrug and the maids who had brought the babies to their crib obligingly scooped them up again and brought them to Raisa’s arms.

“The princess will love you no less for slumbering across a room from her,” the chief lady’s maid remarked gently, “nor will her father fault you for it,” but Raisa had already inched deep into the grand bed and begun a nest of pillows for her drowsy chicks. Their bellies would be empty and clamoring soon and they would not have to search or cry for their milk – least of all the tiny princess, who had veritably doubled in health and size since being put to the breast.

The maids departed at last and Raisa unlaced her nightgown, curling herself around the babes in their shared hollow and now and again brushing a nipple across a drowsy mouth to see if one or the other might take it. Luka, her middle son, had suckled sometimes even when she had no milk, and it had served as a comfort to them both, but Peeta and the princess were preoccupied, fussing and rolling against each other with sleepy little grunts and coos. Raisa supposed it was good for the princess to have a brother to love and be loved by in turn, but somehow it made her lonely this night.

She was astonished by how much and how intensely she missed her late husband. His warm bulk to press up against in their crowded narrow bed and the thatch of coarse curls on his chest that seemed to beg for kisses in the last lazy moments before they rose to begin the day’s baking. How the golden hairs on his forearms were always dusted with flour, even after countless washings-up, and the heady aroma of yeast breads perpetually drenched his fair skin, accompanied now and again by a faint smoky whisper of the crusts he burned once a week without fail for Marko to feed to the ducks on the green.

Not every night had been about the queen – very few indeed after their first year of marriage – and all at once Raisa missed the comfort of a large hand fondling her breast in the darkness and a nudge against her backside; a nudge that made her angle her hips without thought and press back to meet him. Janek was big – or so she surmised – and he filled her deep and deliciously as they nestled together beneath the coverlets, grunting softly against her nape as he pumped into her, so gently, and finally gave one long, shivering moan as he sank as deep as he could and held there, swollen and tremoring inside her, then spilled out with a whimper that she could still feel in her bones.

Raisa was still a young woman and there had been too many such nights to easily forget; nights where the presence of children slumbering fitfully beside them made lovemaking cramped and furtive – and all the more exquisite for it.

She gave a little sigh, laying her cheek against Peeta’s downy crown, and heard the door open.


	3. The King's Bride

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning:** Here be Jack/Raisa smut. I ship these two like mad, but if this (semi-crack ship) pairing squicks you out, feel free to skim or skip this chapter.

Wondering what the lady’s maids had forgotten – perhaps they meant to steal the babes back to their crib and thought she would be asleep already – Raisa sat up to find the king a few steps from her bedside, his silver wedding raiment glittering in the firelight, regarding her with something halfway betwixt hunger and sorrow.

“Your majesty,” she gasped, and tugged her nightgown clumsily closed over her swollen breasts. Somehow it was mortifying that he should find her in such a state, and he still arrayed in his own finery after the grandeur of the day’s events.

And why were the babes not hungry? They should have drained her breasts a quarter-hour ago, not drowsed the night away while she ached beneath the weight of rich milk.

The king gazed down at her but spoke no word in reply.

“Have you come for the princess?” she asked, the likeliest reason for his presence at this moment. Perhaps he longed for his late spouse, as she did, and the princess was the nearest thing he had to her, as Peeta was to Janek. Perhaps they could all share this bed tonight and soothe each other’s grief with their presence.

“No,” he spoke at last, and hoarsely, but he did take his daughter away; carefully, as an object of spun glass, to lay in her crib, and then Peeta, held every bit as tenderly in those deft royal hands.

Raisa’s heart tumbled over itself in terrified elation. “She will need milk soon,” she said, a little desperately. “And the boy too.”

The king returned to the bedside but made no move to touch her, nor to draw nearer. “I do not expect to disturb you for long,” he replied, and his voice was so filled with sadness that it made her heart clench with grief. “Or indeed at all, if you do not wish it.”

She looked at his silver eyes, so weary with weeping, and his wide, soft mouth in its nest of black beard, grown thicker since she kissed him in the bakery and still untrimmed, even on this, his wedding day. She took in the strong column of his throat above the milky moonstones that trimmed his collar and his hands, slender and dusky and so unlike Janek’s solid, oven-scarred brawn.

“I _do_ wish it,” she whispered.

His wedding raiment was held together by countless ornate buttons and hooks and clasps and she climbed from the bed on trembling, boneless limbs to aid in divesting him of each heavy piece, almost as she would a child. The king wore silver but his body was gold by firelight, and only when he stood naked before her did he finally raise a hand, so hesitantly, toward her nightgown.

He was so beautiful that Raisa ached at the sight: his form tall and leanly muscled, all smooth olive skin dusted with fine black hairs that looked soft as down, and every part of him exquisitely shaped. His member, slimmer than Janek’s, was long and lovely – fancy, that such a thing could be handsome to look on! – but lay limp in its nest between his magnificent legs, and Raisa caught her lip betwixt her teeth at a moment of worry. She had only rarely done anything to encourage _that_ – a quick teasing grasp at the front of Janek’s breeches, and typically well in advance of the act – and the thought of doing any such thing to this figure of angelic perfection was nothing short of horrifying. But perhaps this king, so halting in his touches and full of sorrow, was not intent on lovemaking tonight.

“I have no expectation, Raisa,” he said softly, brushing his fingers against her sleeve. “Not for either of us.”

Raisa loosed the breath she had not realized she was holding. She could do as much, and gladly; could lie beside this beautiful man and let him do whatever made the grief lessen.

She stepped forward to press a kiss to the hollow of his throat and felt him shudder.

She was reluctant to shed her own clothing, to show her too-mortal mother’s body to such a radiant being, but those deft golden hands drifted to her remaining, ineffectual laces and, with a glance to approve the action, opened her nightgown to the waist.

“Beautiful,” he whispered, and with a gentle tug the featherlight peach-flesh pooled at her feet.

She had never simply stood naked before Janek and something in the king’s gaze – something that could not be, and yet felt like, adoration – made her flush everywhere. She climbed quickly back into bed and held up the coverlets for him to join her beneath, but he didn’t want that: instead, he drew the covers back till she was as unshielded as she had been at the bedside then carefully lowered himself beside her.

When his mouth touched her breast – a damp kiss, rough with whiskers, pressed just above the nipple – a cry tore its way from her throat.

“Have I hurt you?” he panted, raising his head with a stricken look, and his very breath was musical, like a dance against her skin.

“No,” she whispered – pleaded, rather – and raised a trembling hand to guide him back. His black hair was silky as raven’s feathers beneath her fingers and this time his mouth found her nipple in a hot moan and a wet stroke of tongue that wrought a surge of slippery dampness between her legs.

She wondered if he merely wanted her breasts, this king who had likely seen more of them than he had of her face and, indeed, asked her to marry him as a result. Heaven knew Janek had liked them well enough. Shortly after Luka was born he had discovered, quite by delicious accident, that a hungry infant was not the only one who could suckle milk from a breast, and it had brought a heady new dimension to their midnight interludes that rapidly led to conceiving Peeta.

But no, the king cupped her breasts in his hands – or rather, as best he could in their heavy, swollen state – and anointed them with a flurry of kisses, at once gentle and wild, interspersed with delicious languid nuzzles of his bearded face against their curves and ragged, plaintive moans, then without warning he moved up to kiss her mouth. His lips were both hesitant and a little desperate against hers and it was the most wonderful thing Raisa had ever felt in her life.

“I should have kissed you in the bakery,” he groaned against her mouth. “ _Oh,_ my brave bride. I have relived that moment in my dreams every night since and longed without hope for it to have ended some other way.”

“What other way?” she whispered in wonder, and he raised his head to reply.

“I should have taken you in my arms and told you that you were magnificent,” he murmured, closing her eyes with a kiss to each one. “A blazing beacon of hope on that cold and bitter day. I should have thanked you for saving my life as well as my daughter’s and begged you to become my wife, not merely proposed that you should sit on a cold throne beside me.”

“Your majesty,” she breathed, overcome by his words and the tremulous ardor with which they were spoken.

“ _Jack,_ ” he insisted, making her shiver with pleasure. “Alyssum’s death shattered my heart and I cannot promise it will ever mend sufficiently to carry love for another, save our child. But I can and will promise you a life of tenderness and devotion as my wife and –”

“That is more than I dared to dream of, Jack,” she assured him, and leaned up to capture his mouth with a whimper.

This kiss was lingering and slowly, warily mutual, and Raisa wound her arms about him as it went on, moaning at the feel of bare skin against her own for the first time in what felt an eternity. It was rare that she could be fully naked with Janek – since the boys had come along, quite impossible – and twining with this glorious king, all warm dusky skin and lean muscle and fine soft hairs, was almost more than she could bear. Her thighs fell open of their own accord and the king sank between them with a grateful moan, his member stirring against her with hopeful instinct and nosing blindly down her cleft toward the damp heat below.

A burst of foolish joy sprang from her heart in a wild little laugh, making the king draw back in confusion. “We need not,” he reminded her with a gasp, in direct opposition to the swollen shaft rearing suddenly, proudly, between them, its tip already beaded with anticipation, and the sight of it made her laugh again, but jubilantly. So long had it been since she and Janek had enjoyed such a moment – had they _ever_ enjoyed such a moment? – and here was the newly widowed king of the land, who but days ago would take nothing but bread and water in his grief, whispering words of tenderness and devotion and poised erect at her very portal.

“No, we need not,” she agreed with a smile she could not quite restrain. “But I would, and gladly, if such is your desire.”

To her astonishment the king laughed in reply; a sharp, lovely sound, like the cry of a startled songbird, and as surprising to him as to Raisa. “It is,” he said, almost in wonder – that he could desire anything, or anyone, so swiftly after his terrible loss – and with a careful shift of his hips he brought the tip of his member to her hollow and slid slowly inside – cautiously, watching her face for resistance or pain, but Raisa could scarcely keep her eyes open at the bliss of feeling him inside her.

Even fully engorged his member was slimmer than Janek’s, but Janek had always seemed a little _too_ big, especially when months had passed between their intimate encounters. She loved the breathtaking fullness of taking him inside her, especially from behind, when she could bury her moan in the pillow as he pressed toward the front of her womb, but the sheer breadth of him had sometimes – _almost_ – felt like too much.

But the king, it seemed, had been made for her in this regard. He fitted inside her as though he had always dwelt there, as though he were a part of her that had simply gone away for a time, and his return was a thing of overwhelming joy, of ecstasy and relief all at once. She felt her body hitch and tighten the moment he was fully sheathed – a sensation Janek had wrought on a handful of occasions, but never so swiftly nor with so little effort – and then he began to move, slow sinuous strokes that made the sun itself burst behind her eyes.

The pleasure crashed through her in a sob, startling the king to stillness, and he took her face in his hands, so gently, seeking the source of her tears, but she shook her head and gasped for him to continue. She was slick with pleasure now and he slipped in and out of her in fluid, pulsing glides that dizzied her and made her thighs loll wider still, eager – nay, desperate – for as much of this as he could give her. The king’s own pleasure was at last taking hold and his movements grew quicker, firmer, deeper, punctuated by soft grunts and gasps that were as musical as any song and more beautiful still.

This, she thought wildly, was what women meant when they spoke of being made love to by fairies or demons. This beautiful man moving inside her, whose sweat smelled of chrism and amber and whose groans fell on her ears like a psalm, was so much more than mortal, and suddenly she feared that he would vanish as soon as he’d spent himself in her; would soar from the chamber on heretofore hidden wings to find another mortal vessel for his glittering seed.

And then he did spend himself, with a sharp arch of his back and a soaring cry that split her heart with its impossible beauty, and he sank over her with a laugh, a dazed, euphoric sound as his mouth, pleasure-clumsied and far too wet, clambered up to cover hers. “Raisa,” he sighed, “ _oh,_ precious Raisa, how have we endured all this while?”

One of the babes gave a determined wail then – little Katniss, Raisa realized amid tears of raw joy, ready for her milk at last – but the king clung to his wife with an indignant chuckle, trapping her in his arms and pinning her with his full weight. He was still inside her, albeit slim and soft once more, and the thought of losing that missing piece again, however briefly, was sufficient to keep Raisa beneath him, and content with it, when in any other circumstances she would have leapt up at once – indeed, moved heaven and earth – to respond to the princess’s merest coo.

“Mine,” he grunted with stubborn, blinding happiness against her throat. “ _My_ bride. _My_ wedding night.”

“The one who is crying is also yours,” she reminded him with a ragged chuckle. “And thus you know she will only cry louder and longer if you delay in answering.”

Duly chastened, he gave a grumbling laugh and eased out of her with a little sound of dismay, only to pause and linger there, his spent member wet and heavy on her thigh. “I did not anticipate this,” he groaned, resting his brow on hers. “That a babe’s needs should be so…importunate.”

Raisa laughed riotously and reached between them to give his flaccid, forsaken member a conciliatory pat. “ _This_ , importunate, your majesty?” she teased. “I had a babe bawling for my breast while the one in my womb perched upon my bladder and still my husband and I managed to steal a little pleasure together.”

He sat up a little, brows raised. “ _Jack_ ,” he reminded her, and she motioned toward the crib. “Fetch me the babes, Jack,” she ordered playfully, “and if you wish further pleasure, I will show you how it might be obtained.”

The king sprang to obey like a scolded scullion and returned with a babe cradled in either arm – the squalling princess to one side and stubbornly sleepy Peeta to the other – and Raisa caught her breath at the image they presented: her dusky husband, lean and lovely and unabashedly naked, clasping two infants to his chest. “Would I could feed them thus,” she lamented. “For you make a pretty picture indeed, and one I am loathe to ruin.”

The king tipped his head in thought then bade her move a little ways, so he might prop himself against the pillows at the head of the bed, and Raisa inched back on her knees to oblige, only to shake her head in puzzlement once the three were settled. “Katniss is like to find your own breast in a moment,” she observed, with a nod at the impatient princess now rooting furiously against her father’s chest. “Have you room for me in this fine nest?”

He nodded at the space between his arms, and the cradle formed by his legs. “You can hold and feed the babes while I hold you,” he proposed with the happy air of a child who has simply solved a perplexing riddle. “Or…will that not suffice?” he wondered, his smile faltering.

“It will more than suffice, Jack,” she whispered, and quickly fitted herself into their midst, easing the babes from his arms and guiding each to a breast. The princess’s shrieks turned to coos before the first drop of milk struck her tongue, and Peeta gave a timely yawn and latched on as well, albeit lazily, when to his surprise, his wide little mouth closed around a nipple.

“You are magnificent,” the king murmured against Raisa’s neck, snugging his arms about her waist in a lush and lingering embrace. “You are certain the babes will not be…hurt, if I should touch you while they feed?”

She turned her head to brush a kiss across one worried cheek. “Off-put, perhaps, if we cause them to lose their latch,” she conceded. “But the midwives tell me there is nothing… _unwholesome_ for a suckling babe in the pleasure-seeking of their parents. At home, such were often the only quiet moments to be found,” she explained with a blush, “and the mother of an infant seizes and savors every opportunity for intimacy, no matter how awkward or brief.”

He leaned down to kiss her mouth, so softly, and she admitted, “I do not know, however, that we can…fit together while I feed two at once. I fed both Luka and Peeta for a time but…I was damaged by Peeta’s birth,” she explained feebly, “and-and angry, and my husband died soon after –”

Another kiss stopped her words, this one somehow, impossibly, gentler still. “There is no need for you to do anything at all,” the king murmured. “Simply hold the babes and lie back against me.”

This, she thought, was more than enough, to feel his chest against her back and his arms about her waist while a babe suckled happily at either breast, and she sank against him with a sigh and let her eyes drift closed, only to open them again with a little gasp at the feel of strong, slender fingers probing gently between her legs. The king was _opening_ her, spreading the folds between her legs as carefully as petals of a delicate bud. Janek had never done any such thing; never shown any interest whatsoever in the thatch of ruddy curls that extended from the lower half of her belly down over the mound of her groin, and she wanted to twine her legs together, to hide this place the king had found, that her husband had never so much as looked for.

One fingertip slipped into the hollow between the folds – she was wet there too; how had she never known this? – and stroked from bottom to top, light as a butterfly’s wing, but the sensations evoked had her bowing forward with a strangled cry.

It felt _wondrous._

There was no other word for it. The king’s careful touch in that place, most especially over a tiny nubbin of flesh at the heart of that slippery hollow, felt like _Heaven_ ; like the purest sort of pleasure, pulsing from that hidden place in brilliant white-gold waves, and so intense it was almost edged in pain.

She wanted to look and not look all at once, to see this thing the king had found at the secret heart of her own body that he touched like a fragile treasure. She wanted to close her legs and to spread them wide; to have no more of this and have nothing _but_ this for the rest of her life. Above all she wanted to stop the exquisite torment of his hand, but both her arms were fully occupied with babes and she could do naught but continue to recline against him, gasping and writhing and aching with pleasure.

The king’s bearded face sank into the curve of her neck and he sucked wetly at the tender skin, a startling counterpoint to the infant mouths at her breasts, and still he caressed between her legs: a steady, constant flicker, almost relentless in its gentleness. “Raisa,” he moaned, and she felt his member stir a little against her backside. “ _Oh,_ lovely Raisa…”

“What are you _doing_ to me?” she cried softly, and the king’s finger stilled against her.

He lifted his face from her neck, but not far; only to press a kiss to her cheek, then the tender hollow behind her ear. “Your husband,” he rasped, and he sounded quite as overcome as she. “He never…he did not…?”

“He had no interest in…that place,” she panted. “Nor had I.”

“Oh Raisa,” he sighed, and there was both pity and compassion in his beautiful voice as he caressed between her legs once more, soft and gentle yet rhythmic, a weightless feather-strum across a celestial string. “You lay a treasure before him every night and all he cared for was spilling his seed inside you.”

“He was…a good husband,” she insisted, but weakly, as sweet, searing pleasure closed her eyes and flared behind them in bright white bursts. “A kind lover, but I think he knew naught of this. Who taught you?” she begged. “Who showed you this wonder?”

She thought she would die if it had been the queen.

“The monks at the abbey,” he murmured against her cheek with a ragged chuckle, never ceasing in his touch. “Their curriculum of anatomy is exemplary for a body of celibate brothers. They could tell me little enough of the sacred bud, as they called it,” he said, circling the nubbin with a fingertip, “save that it existed and where, but I daresay that is more than an uneducated man might know.”

“We must bring them gifts,” she gasped. “Stock their treasury to its rafters and outfit their every chapel with gilding and stained glass.”

The king laughed huskily and gave a playful nip at her earlobe. “Why do you suppose I visit them so frequently?” he teased. “With gold in hand, no less?”

“Because you are pious,” she retorted through her bliss, because this much was too widely known to be façade, and the king nuzzled soothingly at her neck.

“Forgive me,” he placated, stilling his hand and cupping it over her, as he might comfort a frightened wild thing. “I meant no impiety. There is true holiness in the lovemaking of husband and wife, so often ignored in the pursuit of base pleasure.”

“Is there?” she wondered, for such a thing this angelic king would know. There had been pleasure with Janek now and again and some of it had seemed lovely beyond measure – leastways, until she became this man’s wife.

“It shall be my honor to show you,” he replied, and his hand stirred against her once more, a gentle stroke of one fingertip across that tender bud, but this time she felt another fingertip as well, this one dipping into the slick hollow his member had but lately quitted.

“ _May_ I?” he whispered and she nodded dizzily in reply, uncertain what he could wish to touch in that place but equally overcome by anticipation for it.

All at once his mouth engulfed her earlobe in a hot wet suckle as one long finger slid inside her and another took up the careful stroking at her cleft, and Raisa’s very being convulsed at the pleasure. She moaned so loudly she was sure she had terrified the babes – but no, they carried on, undisturbed and content at their feeding as the king caressed her secret parts, inside and out, his deft fingers dancing and delving through her slickness as he devoured her earlobe in slow laps and fierce, hungry suckles. His finger glided in and out of her in the semblance of his member – now shallow, now deep, now curling a little inside her as he withdrew – and it should not have felt so wondrous but it _did_ – _oh_ how it did! The world swam in a blur of firelight on sunset-hued coverlets as she buckled against his fingers, sobbing at pleasure so sharp and heady and spiraling that it _must_ shatter her heart – how could it not? Surely her mortal body could not survive such a maelstrom of impossible sensation.

She felt her arms give out beneath the babes as she slumped bonelessly against the king and heard him whisper her name like a prayer.

“Your late husband has much to answer for,” murmured the king against her brow, surely an eternity later, and Raisa started at the absence of babes in her arms, which lay limp at her sides, but no, they suckled on – _Greedy single-minded pups,_ she thought indulgently – cradled securely to her breasts by the king’s strong arms, wrapped around her. “Was this stolen pleasure of which you spoke his alone?” he wondered sadly.

She shook her head against him; a feeble loll, so pleasure-spent was she. “He was…a peasant baker, your majesty,” she panted. “Not a king, with learnèd monks to teach him of hidden treasures betwixt a woman’s legs.”

“Treasures which might be found and savored by any patient or devoted lover,” the king remarked, but gently; so gently, with something like regret. “The monks taught me little enough – and my name, as I will beg you to recall, particularly in moments such as these, is Jack.”

“ _Jack,_ ” she sighed without hesitation, and was rewarded with a tender kiss to her neck.

“I love my name on your lips,” he groaned, nuzzling her with greedy relish. “It is like a treasure for which I must plead and labor, again and again. How might I entice you to say it again, and freely?”

“I require no enticement to obey my king's command,” she assured him breathlessly. “Nor, I think, could I survive it.”

“I do not command you, Raisa,” he murmured. “Nor have I any wish to. I supplicate. I entreat. I implore.”

“Give me the babes,” she said hoarsely, and without hesitation he eased them into her arms once more. This being done, she turned in his arms and found herself cradled to his chest, with the princess, half-asleep at her suckling, held between them.

“This is what you want,” the king realized softly and not a little sadly, raising a hand to caress his daughter’s cheek. “I knew it – indeed, have known it all this while – and was the veriest fool to wish otherwise. No new-made widow weds for want of a man, let alone a new-made widower –”

Raisa leaned up to kiss the frown from his mouth and eyes. “I want your daughter, Jack,” she conceded in a whisper. “I have loved her as my own since I first heard her cry and wanted her for my own since I took her to my breast. But I could just as well have been her wet-nurse,” she reasoned, but tremulously, for all at once her mother’s cruel words echoed in her mind, and she feared the king might see, too late, the wisdom in another course. “I might have been merely another maid in your palace,” she said, “engaged solely to suckle the princess, and little trouble or expense it would have cost you. There was no need to offer your hand, nor for me to accept.”

“There was _every_ need,” he breathed. “For my part, at least.”

He did not elaborate, but in that moment there was no need for it. “And for my part as well,” she replied with a broken little laugh. “I knew not what you wanted of me, nor what you would allow –”

“ _Anything_ ,” he told her ardently. “Half my kingdom is yours by right, and my name and my hand besides. Ask anything of me and you shall have it.”

“I wish to love you,” she whispered and dropped her eyes swiftly to the suckling princess, for she could not bear to witness the king’s response to such a demand. “For I do already,” she confessed, “and have done since you sat by the ovens and took cider and cheese from my hand. I know it is unthinkable, and I unworthy even to –”

The king’s mouth covered hers, hot and fierce, and held fast till her lips ceased in their feeble protests. “Say it again,” he implored. “Say it outright, I beg of you.”

“I love you, Jack, son of Ashpet the Huntress-Queen,” she said, and caught her breath at the wonder in his silver eyes. “I will call you by name so long as you grant me leave to do so, and I will never again speak my love aloud unless you wish it –”

“I wish it,” he said at once and drew her to him, babes and all, and kissed her again and again. “ _Oh,_ how I wish it,” he sighed. “Your heart is a greater dowry than any treasure of silver or gold, and one I can never hope to deserve. I shall do everything in my power to make you glad of the gift; only tell me –”

“I love you, Jack,” she replied, laughing through her tears, and together they tumbled into the coverlets, a mass of eager kisses and laughter and indignant drowsy babes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the part where I make a token apology for the preceding and promise never to write anything like it ever again. ;)
> 
> Also: Jack isn't magically "over" the loss of Alys, of course, but he and Raisa are incredibly good for each other (and each other's kids) in this universe, which will help the grieving process a great deal. 
> 
> Finally, I'm fairly certain I'm going to find a loophole to save/redeem Raisa from the wicked stepmother fate because I love her so stinking much, especially in this AU context with a devoted husband and wealth/comfort and a beautiful little daughter. <3


End file.
